What Facebook Knows

A long article on the data Facebook collects and what they might do with it.

If Facebook were a country…

It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company’s servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it.

Facebook collects this data by making it convenient and useful for us to give it to them. There is tremendous potential to use this data to help us understand the human condition. On the other hand…

It is more than a little creepy to think about Facebook computer scientists examining our personal conversations and cross referencing those thoughts to our age, profession and countless other demographics. Is this a serious loss of privacy?

Dentists and most other small busines people are eager to jump on the Social Media, Facebook bandwagon. Should we really be doing this?